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THE ANT.

No. XVII.-SATURDAY, 30th JUNE, 1827.

Original.

THE WATERING-PLACES. No. I.
Gourock.

(Concluded from No. XVI.)

Ir is eight o'clock-and the month is June. The sun of course has not yet set behind these hills which his flaming glories already diadem with gorgeous lustre. In many of those apartments, which, on ground and other floors, by open windows and smart screens, indicate the residence of the migrative tribes, the tea has been sipped, and the most striking parts of the gossip of Glasgow disburthened, and the ladies are adjusting their shawls and tying their bonnets; and now every "land" from the Rope Walk to Kempuck, "M'Farlane's and all," is pouring out its promenaders, while the servant lasses are unpacking the commissariat baskets, laying aside the lamb and quartern loaves, or, when unexpected visitors have arrived, beating up the bakers' and the butchers' quarters, and "shaking down" feather beds in the barrack department. The tide of beauty sets to the westward; and while some premeditate, by the speed of their gait, a walk to the Clough, others are obviously inclined to go no farther than Hunger'emout, Mr. Rankine's, or, perchance, as the evening is not sultry, to M'Inroy's Point.

I shall rest me a while on this green knoll, and watch the current of human happiness as it glides past me, said I to myself, as I sat down by the wayside, a little beyond the tall city-looking building, with the ominous name, and clumsy seaward-turned outside turnpike, that looks as if it had been lifted for the season from the Saltmarket, and was to be carried back in September; and as the peristrephic panorama passed before me, I fell into one of those reveries where it is not easy to distinguish between what is really passing before the eye of the body and that of the imagination. It appeared to me, as if much of beauty and

something of folly had marshalled themselves and passed successively in review; and I only wish that I had fixed down in my portfolio the fleeting impressions of the one and of the other, that interspersed themselves, ever and anon, with the placid yet elevated delight which a summer's sunset always affords me, in a scene like that by which I was on each hand surrounded. That young lady in a black dress, which her own eyes far out-jet, seems as brightspirited as she is beautiful-but yet it appears to me as if the fire of that eye flashed every thing in turn, rather than habitually beamed intelligence. These are surely sisters habited in the delicate and airy robes of gossamer-like muslin, in which the beauty of the butterfly's wing is inscribed on the tissue of Arachne's web. There is a good-will in their gait, a good-nature in their look, and a warm-heartedness in their mien, that might make that youth at his ease, who is acting the amiable beside them, in spite of his starched cravat and tightly strapped calf-covers. Cherry-coloured ribbons do become even a matron-but I doat upon light blue round the hair of little sparklers! Will these gentlemen never allow the ladies to hear the sound of their own voices-or is it the tumbler that still speaks within them? That fellow cannot surely have seen a lady for a week, that he pours out such a torrent of tittle tattle. But the cheery merriment of a group of misses-too old to be called children, and too young to be grave as "women"-of fifteen, is a music that repays the jarring of the by-gone group. This grave coterie is made up of old stagers, who have never missed a season at Gourock for twenty years, and have a by-sight acquaintance with every pebble between this and Kempuck stone. These reckless looking youths, already tipsy, of whom no one apparently knows any good, since no one recognises them, have escaped the punch dissipation of Glasgow, to plunge into the sea and whisky toddy one, of two sleepless nights, at what is not a watering, if an inspiriting, place to them. The bankrupt master and the broken-down clerk are there, and their motto is the Epicurean's," Live while you live," however briefly, they might add.

The sun is now behind the Cowal hills: the noble foreground of the Peninsula, which separates the Holy Loch from Loch Long, is shrouded in shadow; and these arms of the giant sea are folded up in the slight vesture of a night which is hardly dark. The groups have returned: the neat supper and comfortable tumbler 'waits me, which the

skilful management of a pattern of wives has prepared for her husband's guests. The wearied old boatmen have crept to their summer truckle-beds in outhouses and barns -the younger ones have stolen to the wells of the village to meet the city servant lasses. Granny M'Kinlay, who yet was never a mother, and so little of a wife as to insert her maiden name upon her sign-board, is complaining that she has been "splushphemed up hill and down dale,' by some one "who cursed her tyled dyke," and telling any one who will listen as secrets what every body knows. Bauldy Bain is snoring almost as loud now as he will do at every pull he gives the church bell to-morrow, which hardly out-echoes him as it summons the Genteels, the SoSos, and all other subdivisions of summer society in Gourock, to that service which is impressive and touching, from the singular mixture its auditory exhibits of a city, a sea-faring, and an agricultural population, in all their varieties of age, manner, expression, and costume, crammed within a building little better than, and not so large as, a barn, and with a floor not so well swept, nor benches so conveniently placed as those at harvest home, to hear a pious worthy man, who is as miserably paid as the chapel is kept, while yearly hundreds of opulent individuals avail themselves of the decency of attending his ministrations.

I am tired-my bed is ready-my sketch is finished; and to-morrow will be a day of silent happiness and holy enjoyment, amid the impressive grandeur of nature's loveliest combination of sea and land.

Monday morning, half-past four.-The horn blows-I am not half slept. M'Glashan's high charges for poor accommodation are paid,-and again on the way to Glasgow, along with many other tired seekers for enjoyment and variety, is the wearied

HERMIT OF THE WEST.

THE PHRASEOLOGIST. No. I.

He doesn't meddle with politics.-Used in reference to a man whose selfishness is so intense, that it prevents him from seeing that the good of the public is the benefit of the individual; or who, like the Aberdeen tide-waiter, holds out his open hands-while he closely shuts his eyelids.

He's very clever though-quite a genius.-The concluding words in which common-place people think they have

described what, as they cannot comprehend it, they cannot well delineate;-what too often winds up the vague laudation of some one who thinks the possession of certain mental peculiarities, or, it may be, powers, renders the retention of other ordinary qualities-as method, industry, punctuality, &c. superfluous;-with a but following it, and accompanied by a shake of the head, it is meant to imply that the principle which gives life to acquirements also incapacitates the possessor from practically availing himself of these in the business of the world—as if it took away from the salubrity of the element of water that it gushed up in a fountain, rather than oozed through the earth, or dribbled from a rock. He's been unfortunate in business.-Applied indifferently to those who have suffered ruinous losses-those whom they again have made suffer-and to those who were the origin of the suffering without being ruined;-an expression which as often implies folly or roguery as illfuck, stupidity, good-nature, or uncontrollable circum

stances.

She'll have at least thousand pounds.—A climax in the description of beauty, to which ordinary rhetorical figures are comparatively unadorned prose and sober assertion. To fill up the blank, divide the spoken sum by 5 and by 3, and the result will be the lady's dowry if she have any.

THE SOFA. No. III.

SCENE-The dining apartment of the VENUS Steam-Boat.

HENRY WHITE, CHARLES HERON, and another Goodfellow-name of no consequence.

H. W.-It is fortunate for us, if not for the steward, that but three of us dined here to-day. Had there been more than the number of the Graces, we could not have been "all sipping punch-all sipping tea-all talking-and all damned," Wordsworth says-on this fateuil, or SOFA:-your leg a little to one side, if you please, Charles.

as

C. H.-There. No, faith! such may not happen again till December; for "every body," I hear-that aggregate animal— has bespoke the barque of Cyprus' queen for each day this season. We may thank our stars that it is Saturday evening, when

none but clergymen come up the river, and such nice gentlemen as you, who think Sunday vulgar in the country. It is indeed a wonderfully elegant suite of apartments it boasts of this galley, but the steam organ is a joke. Before the elastic fluid propelled its music, I wondered one day what the deuce made a fellow, every now and then, pour whisky down a hatch beneath the floor-cloth, till I learned that a full length Jack Tar was imprisoned below to move it, in place of the vapour!

Goodfellow.-Why, that was only improving upon the plan of a moving power from burning alcohol, by substituting a better use of it-swallowing!

C. H.-It was not to be wondered at, then, that it was at once played flat and con spirito.

H. W.-By the bye, that is a beautiful uniform edition of Wordsworth just out-the first set of his writings that would range;-I don't pun. It will do more to extend his popularity than all the laboured panegyrics of his followers-by making his works accessible, and portable, and well-looking in their dress, instead of being a ragged regiment, of all statures, from the grenadier quarto, to the triangle-boy like twenty-fours.

C. H.-Ay, ay! your bookseller is the true Fame, after all, although he has no other wings than the "broad sheet," nor trumpet than a friendly critique or insinuating puff. It is the active or the slovenly publisher who makes or mars a man of genius,-in as far as the voice of the mass of the public may help to do one or other. What indefatigable exertions the publisher of the "Scots Worthies" has made for that new edition of his ! Old Howie may well pardon the taking off the rough beard of his style, for the being shown up so well in a good coat, and put forward into so many genteel modern companies— who had hardly ever heard of the men who bled that they might go to church without an escort of dragoons.

Goodfellow.-Can either of you two sages tell me whether a desperately favourable, or severe review, does most good

to a new book?

H. W.

At same time.

C. H.

'Oh! there can be no question-the

panegyric, of course.

Oh! there can be no doubt-the mauling does.

Goodfellow. Then the success of Horace Smith's novels is easily accounted for, gentlemen; since never were works 80 ridiculously praised, or so unjustly condemned; but by the hits being contrary ways, they still stand up, I perceive, for another has come out.

H. W.-Ay, "Reuben Apsley,"-fluent without facilitycopious without force-careless without ease-yet elaborate without skill,-except in the preface.

C. H.-Why, you seem to think that there was much truth

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